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Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon, the widow and son of singer-songwriter John Lennon, came to the state Capitol on Friday to deliver an anti-hydrofracking letter to Gov. Andrew Cuomo and some 204,000 comments to the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

The comments, contained in dozens of boxes bearing the names of the environmental groups formed to oppose the controversial natural gas drilling technique, are in response to the DEC’s latest set of draft regulations, released in early December. The 30-day comment period on the regs ends Friday.

Anti-fracking activist and physician Sandra Steingraber, representing Concerned Health Professionals of NY, criticized the release of the new regs before the completion of the latest version of the DEC’s mammoth environmental impact statement, especially the chapter devoted to the potential health impacts of fracking — a key section now under review by the Department of Health, with assistance from outside experts.

“The regs are thus arbitrary placeholders as part of a legal maneuver that allowed the DEC to avoid missing a rule-making deadline,” Steingraber said. (The DEC has admitted as much.) She called the composition of comments “the writing assignment from hell,” due to what she described as the lack of transparency in the process and the brevity of the comment period — which overlapped with the December holiday season.

Although many of the advocates on hand doubt that any regulatory framework can make fracking safe, Steingraber believes the comment-writing exercise was useful both to put DEC and the Cuomo administration on notice of public opposition (“Silence is consent,” she said) and to encourage close study of the new regs.

Lennon said that concern for his family’s farm upstate got him interested in fracking, and noted that even the possibility that fracking could cause earthquakes has appeared in major media outlets such as the New York Times and was “not just heebie-jeebie hippie nonsense.” He said the process threatens an “unparalleled industrialization” of the state’s rural regions.

Ono pointed to the many green-energy proposals in Cuomo’s State of the State address, contrasting them with his utter silence on frtacking in that speech.

“Fracking kills,” she said, adding that allowing the process could be another step on the path to a sort of global suicide.

“The state of New York is not going to be crazy,” said Ono, despite her being a longtime resident history’s extensive contraindications. [Gag retooled for more precise humor targeting.]

Asked about the fact that the Dakota — the famous Upper West Side apartment building where the Lennons live and where John Lennon was shot by a deranged fan in 1980 — had switched to gas heat, Lennon said that consumption of fossil fuels didn’t require support for every kind of extractive industry.

It’s not clear whether these comments will get the same close eye the DEC devoted to more than 60,000 comments received after the release of the most recent environmental statement — a pile that took months to review by both DEC staff and a private contractor.

Responding to an e-mail seeking information on that question, the agency’s spokeswoman Emily DeSantis said she would get back to us.

Update: DeSantis did so: “DEC will review, carefully consider and respond as appropriate to all comments received on the revisions to the regulations,” she wrote.

Here’s video of the delivery of the letter to Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi:

Here’s the letter to Cuomo, signed by Ono, Lennon and Steingraber, plus Jill Wiener of Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy and Julia Walsh of Frack Action:

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